The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

Mygener.im bug spreads on Facebook

May 7, 2009 | 11:07
am

An example of a Facebook spam message.

Secure your digital surgical masks. Last week's phishing bug that bit many Facebook users is beginning to resurface this morning.

Facebook users are receiving messages from friends today that ask them to visit the website, mygener.im. The site is marked as malicious in most modern browsers, so curious wanderers will receive a warning when attempting to visit the link.

For those daring enough to continue on, the site redirects users through a series of Web domains, eventually landing on, at least for now, an address that doesn't seem to point anywhere.

Today's incident appears to be directly related to last week's phishing outbreak when some Facebook users were duped into giving their passwords to scammers, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt wrote in an e-mail.

"We’ve already blocked the URL from being shared on Facebook and it is now being deleted from inboxes and walls across the site," Schnitt wrote. "Anyone who ...

... shared this content will soon have their account password automatically reset."

The takeaway is generally that anyone can make a page look like Facebook. So, be sure to check your browser's address bar to ensure you're on the correct site before plugging in a password.

But Timothy Wong, a tech-savvy Washington, D.C., resident whose spam message is pictured above, is baffled about how his account was targeted.

"I'm not sure what Web sites I would have gone to that would have synced up any of my systems to this bug," Wong wrote in a Facebook message. "Perhaps it was from one of those addicting third-party Facebook quiz apps."